"Here at last
We shall be free;
Here we may reign secure, and in my
choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven."
- John Milton, Paradise Lost

~¤~

Sunnydale, CA: Earth

"Faith, how're you doing over
there?" Buffy yelled, trying to make herself heard over the screeches of
the hawk-like demon she was fighting. When the demon lunged at her, Buffy
pushed off from the ground and landed a solid punch to the demon's head,
throwing it off balance.

"Five by five, B," Faith
hollered back, grinning. She leapt, executed an awesome three-sixty and kicked
her opponent to the ground, smashing its skull against the gravel.

"Oh yeah," Faith exulted,
"I'm the best! Slayer numero uno!"

Buffy rolled her eyes and managed a
roundhouse kick that brought down the hawk-demon once and for all. She added
some additional bone-cracking blows to its head and finally stepped back to let
the creature's lifeless body disintegrate into grayish, slimy goo.

Gross. I am so never eating tapioca pudding again.

Faith wiped her hands on her leather
pants and glanced around. "Hey, where'd the others go?"

"Excuse me?" Cordelia's
outraged voice reached them from the other end of the street corner, answering
Faith's question for her. "Who gave you permission to slime all over my
new boots? These things cost forty bucks!"

Buffy skidded to the corner to find
Cordelia swiping at a burly, fur-covered creature with a broken broom, yelling
insults at it between jabs and slicing movements. Fred, armed with a metal
chair leg, was trying to get at the creature from behind, but she wasn't
getting anywhere fast.

"Ares, hear my cry,"
Willow's voice suddenly rumbled, powerfully magnified. "Destroy those
who stand in my way, with all the force of fire and flame!"

As she finished the incantation, flames
leapt from her hands and engulfed the nearest fur-creature, fiercely reducing
it to a pile of smoldering ash.

The auburn-haired witch surveyed her
hands and smiled in satisfaction before turning to the others.

"Good," Fred said
empathetically, her Southern-accented voice relieved. She threw the chair leg
back into the Dumpster it had come from. "Ah never want to come unprepared
to another of those meetings again."

"Yeah. I'm going to need a shower
with a fire hose before I get clean of this guck." Faith held up two very
grimy, slime-covered hands, half-grinning despite her disgust.

"Tell me about it," Buffy
groused. "It'll take me a week to get clean."

She pretended not to notice that she was
attracting the attention of about every guy seated outside of the ice cream
parlor; her dark hair was ruffled, her makeup had smeared and made her look
slightly wild and her clothes were torn oh-so-fetchingly, which amounted to
quite a lot for the male patrons of the parlor to ogle at. The others were, of
course, equally attractive, but somehow nobody managed to dress quite as
eye-catchingly – or, in the words of Cordelia, as "sluttily" - as
Faith did.

"Ah never been a chocolate fan
myself," Fred said, "but give me a raspberry cream soda any
day." She looked upwards, beyond the umbrella that covered their table,
and squinted at the bright sunlight as she slurped the last of her soda.

Buffy finished off her butterscotch
sundae with a sigh of satisfaction. "Okay, so now it's official. There is
so nothing like ice cream after a hard day at work."

Cordelia shook back her newly-dyed dark
brown hair and ate the cherry off of her banana split. "The only thing that
could make this better is being guy-free more often. Or, you know, planning a
heavy shopping trip afterwards." She sighed. "But we don't have all
that much free time on our hands."

Faith shrugged. "I think we should
just enjoy our free time while we've got it. That shopping trip doesn't seem
like such a bad idea, C."

"Really?" Cordelia perked up.
"Good, 'cause there's this great place on Weststreet that carries shoes to
die for. It might take our minds off stuff for a while."

"I'm up for it," Buffy said.
She stood up and stretched lightly. "I need something to take my mind off
all this slayage. What with that and the sudden influx of vampires, I've barely
had time to sleep lately."

"Don't worry 'bout it, B. We'll have
you wide awake and kickin' in no time!" Faith promised, winking as she
stood up.

~¤~

"Checkmate." Wesley smiled and
settled back in his chair, enjoying the mildly confused look on his opponent's
face.

Giles sighed and straightened his
glasses. "Well, I must say, it was rather a challenge." He paused to
drain his teacup. "Rematch?"

Wesley considered this for while.
"All right. You're on."

Dawn yawned, as loudly and obviously as
she could. "Bo-ring. Don't you guys ever do anything for fun?"

"Well, I warned you, didn't I?"
Connor relaxed into the sofa next to Dawn, almost as bored as she was.
"British people make lousy babysitters."

"Hey." Dawn smacked him lightly
on the arm. "I never said anything about babysitters!"

Dawn sighed. "I wish Anya was here.
She could show us some really cool demon-power moves. You should really see the
way she blows stuff up –" Dawn halted when she saw the look on Giles's
face. "Or maybe I should just stop there."

"Hey, I think dad left the training
room open. Want to go try out the new equipment?" Connor asked, almost as
an afterthought.

They raced each other to the training
room, and Connor beat Dawn by barely half a second.

"Ha! You can't even keep up,"
he crowed victoriously, earning himself another smack on the arm. Dawn glared
at him, but soon forgot her annoyance when she surveyed the training room.

Metal and chrome glinted at her in
abundance, along with polished wood and tough leather; sharp edges of swords,
daggers and knives gleamed behind the doors of a glass cupboard, leather punching
bags swayed invitingly, gorgeous grappling gloves lay ready on a long, thin
wooden table and wooden dummies just waiting to be beaten were lined up against
the walls.

Connor grinned. "I know. And wait
until you try the titanium spears on for size – those things can run straight
through solid brick."

Dawn quickly slipped on a pair of
grappling gloves, flexed her fingers in admiring satisfaction and moved
straight at one of the dummies. She started easy at first, moving lightly on
her feet and delivering barely visible butterfly blows to the wooden head of
the dummy.

Then she executed a couple of kicks,
nothing very heavy, just to warm her up. She kept the rhythm in her head: kick,
kick, blow, spin, blow, kick, dodge, jab, spin, blow, jab, kick…

Pretty soon she was giving it all she
had, throwing herself full-out at the wooden dummy. Soon enough the dummy's
straw padding fell apart, and when Dawn gave it a final, heavy flying
roundhouse kick, wood splintered as the dummy's midsection cracked under the
pressure of the blow.

"Whoa." Connor stared at the
ruined practice dummy and the hay and splinters strewn on the floor. "You
should really lay off the caffeine there, Mighty Mouse."

Dawn shook her hair back and wiped her
forehead as casually as she could. "At least I have energy enough to make
a real training session," she retorted. "You don't seem to be
doing all that much damage yourself."

"Yeah, well, I'm not related to the
Slayer, am I?" Connor shot back. Dawn only glared in reply and spun out of
the training room, severely ruffled.

Did I just score a direct hit? Connor wondered, watching the young Slayer-to-be storm off.

He could only hope.

~¤~

"Oh, yes," Spike said
sarcastically, "getting myself lost in the bloody sewer system was exactly
how I had planned on spending my day."

"For once, I share your
sentiments," Xander said, staring in utter disgust at a dead rat floating
by in a small river of something very smelly, very oozy and very green. Oh
my god. And whatever killed that rat might still be in here.

The thought did not cheer him up.

"Hey, it wasn't my plan," Oz
said lightly. He seemed totally unaffected by the stinking sewerage surrounding
him, and he only stopped once in a while to lift his foot away from a gooey
pile of something or other.

"Okay, so maybe it wasn't Operation
Brilliant," Angel admitted, squinting into the dim light of the tunnel.
"But it was the only way to patrol without having to worry about the
sunlight."

"Newsflash, Dead Boy – now we have
even worse stuff to worry about." Xander wrinkled his nose, trying to hold
his breath for as long as possible. Oh yeah. Something definitely did
some heavy decaying down here.

"Look, let's just make it to the
mansion. Then we can all send suggestions on how to improve sewer hygiene to
the Sunnydale Slayers-R-Us society. Or maybe the Council for Improved
Lifestyles of Undead Beings."

Spike rolled his eyes. "Cool off
there, Peaches. Just get us out of the damned tunnel first, will you?"

Suddenly the silence was broken by a loud
crunch, followed by a sickening squishing noise.

"Whoops." Oz looked down and
squinted in the dim light.

"What?" Xander craned his head
around. "What happened?"

Oz glanced up briefly. "Dead
squirrel. I think. It had fur, anyway."

"Oh." Xander paused for a very
long moment. "Well, that certainly helped my digestion along."

~¤~

Fenacia, Trinity: Galaxy of the
Stellar Alliance

"No!" All she could hear was
her own voice, repeating the same word over and over, in a shrill, hysterical
moan. "No! No!"

She couldn't breathe, couldn't think; her
senses were clogged and her eyes blinded with panic. Why? The thought
seemed to boom inside her head. Why are they doing this?

She gripped her arms in a tight hug that
almost cut off her circulation, desperately fighting to breathe in sharp,
painful gasps between wild sobbing.

They took him away, chained and bound,
like some sort of cattle. No… no… not Darian! They can't do this!

And then, in a sudden moment of clarity,
it struck her: they could do it. They had done it. They had torn him
from her, simply to be executed as slowly and torturously as possible in
whatever dirty pit they chose to throw him in.

For just a moment, Neyla D'Kan forgot.
She forgot that she had sworn never to touch the ways of the Dark. She forgot
that Darian – her Darian – was a full-fledged Overlord who could survive
anything the Shadows threw at him. She forgot that she was a Guardian, and
therefore not privileged to be personally attached to any sentient being –
especially not an Overlord.

She forgot that she had no right to kill.

But only for just a moment. Then she
realized that she had to push her panic – her fear – away for as long as
possible. The only way to save Darian was to find Nemesis, and quickly.

Maybe then, they could save the Living Worlds
from complete annihilation.

~¤~

"They took him?" Lord Karan
couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Are you quite sure?"

Neyla nodded, her mouth set in a thin,
bitter line. She couldn't afford to let anyone see what she had suffered and
was suffering – for her own sake as well as Darian's.

"Yes. Lord Darian has been taken by
the Shadows."

Lady Garnet, standing across from Neyla
in the Council circle, shook her head. "There has to be more to it. The
Shadow soldiers do not take without reason. There must be an explanation."

"Really?" Neyla, Guardian as
she was, could not keep her voice from trembling – with rage as well grief.
"Then explain it to me, dear Lady Garnet. Fenacia now lies in ruins, and
it was the last free town standing. Trinity is destroyed. The Stellar Alliance
is falling apart. And now the Shadows have taken Overlord Darian. Innocents are
suffering, dying, for no apparent reason. Evelon is burned to the ground and
the Serene Empress has been captured."

Neyla took a deep breath and stared the
other woman straight in the eye. "How do you explain all
that?"

Lady Garnet looked away. "I only
meant…"

"You meant nothing," Neyla said
tiredly, "but that doesn't make it untrue. The Stellar Worlds are
doomed."

"No. Ruined, but not
doomed." When she looked up, Neyla found
Nemesis' iridescent silver eyes fixed on her. "There is a reason
for all of this." Nemesis usually communicated through thought, and
her thought-speak was as silvery and gentle as her voice. The tall, regal woman
held the key to the very Gates of Time, and she was a respected member of the
Council.

Everyone in the Council waited while she
raised her scepter, pointing it towards the center of the circle of deities.

"The Shadows seek something. All
this ravaging, all this killing and destroying… It has a purpose."

Four rays of light burst from the scepter
and formed figures in the center of the room, four smooth, dark orbs that
revolved slowly in mid-air.

"They are searching for this -
the Apocalypse Four.

The only things that will grant the
Shadows complete control of the Living Worlds."

~¤~

Author's
Note: Well,
that's the end of the chapter. Reviews are welcome, as always. I know the
storyline seems kind of stiff right now (and, yes, slightly cliché) but I'll
hopefully be able to change that soon.

And
just for the heck of it, I've decided to put up some quotes from my collection
of Buffy the Vampire Slayer books, as well as my usual quote at the
beginning of a chapter (those books were basically just collecting dust anyway
– might as well use 'em for something).